


Falling Out Of Phase

by AetherAria



Series: Calamitous Intent [1]
Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: (not entirely accurate but closest concise way to describe), Alternate Universe - All Games Canon, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Canon as Mythology, Childhood, Family, Gen, Gerudo Culture, Pre-Canon, Reincarnation, but it may possibly branch off again in late-game territory. we shall see., it's more like- this has a tangential relationship with canon, somehow the strange place it starts in will eventually result in the events of the game (mostly), this isn't really a canon divergence thing or the opposite.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-19 06:11:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15504045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetherAria/pseuds/AetherAria
Summary: They only ever talk about Calamity Ganon, a hundred years on. If there had ever been a man before the monster, a child before the man, no one knew, or no one spoke. No one knows of the child who wanted nothing to do with the path fate had decided for him, and how his departure from his destiny changed the balance of the world. All anyone remembers is the monster, the monsters before him, and those who always defeated him.This story takes place over the course of Ganondorf's youth, from his childhood to his late teens in scattered focus.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> When the chosen ones appear  
> They are always born into this world in perfect balance  
> That is the destiny of the chosen. That is the fate decreed by your gods,  
> The only path for those who bear the crests.  
> When this world brings forth another marked as you are…  
> Know too, that it shall also be visited by one of my blood.  
> -Ganondorf in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (cut lines)

Ganondorf did not _feel_ evil. Since he was a child - since the dreams began - he worried and wondered about his nature endlessly. He would frown into a mirror, twist up his face into a scowl, relax all the lines into ease, glare with all malice, and worry and wonder and question- if he was evil, would he even be able to tell? Did truly evil folk ever know that they were?

The dreams were difficult to understand. Often in the early days, he remembered the emotions from them far more than what had occurred. Often, the loudest of those emotions was anger. Fury. Blinding rage.

He was far too young, when the dreams began, to have any sort of touchstone, any reference for these feelings. He would wake, gnashing his teeth and blinking away tears, not of fear or even the anger itself, but from how it seemed to consume him, overwhelming everything else, every other part of him. There was a pulsing desire, as well, a desperate grasping for anything to bolster him, and beneath even that, a lancing, catalyzing fear.

The need was a heartbeat. Strong. Must be strong. He must be stronger, must be strong enough to protect himself, his own, strong enough to protect that which made him strong-

Always, though, underneath the anger, the need, the fear, there was something else. A different feeling, the only feeling from the unwelcome dreams that he recognized in his waking self: a steadfast, unwavering determination.

(Stubbornness, as he called it in youth.)

(Bedrock under sand and storm.)

Once the dreams began, Ganondorf worried and wondered so deeply that his family very quickly recognized the change.

His sisters teased him, mostly, for that was their way. They prodded at his tender spots and squeezed his frowning cheeks and pretended to find the dark circles beneath his eyes comical rather than concerning.

“Always so _serious_ now, Gan,” Ariya - his youngest sister, still his elder by years - chided him with a false frown of her own. “Where has your smile escaped to, brother? Has a bird come in the night while you snored, to pluck out all your teeth? Is that why you hide your laughter and grins from us now?”

He smiled despite himself, but kept his mouth closed so she could continue her ruse regardless.

“Ah!” She said gamely, and some small nervousness behind her eyes softened, “so they did not steal _that_ , at least!”

  


His parents – his mother and his ona – mostly left him to work through it on his own, choosing to keep up his general teaching and training as it had already been progressing without interruption for his – to their knowledge – capricious moodiness. They probably both thought it was all just typical adolescence, and they had already gone through that with his sisters six times over. They took more trips, possibly because Gan was old enough to be part of the group now and not a nuisance for one of his family members to look after, and Gan liked the city. It was distracting, vibrant, constantly changing, and he didn’t even mind that he had to wear Ariya’s hand-me-down clothing and veil while inside the walls.

“They don’t allow voe inside,” Thamra, the second oldest of his sisters, explained.

“Which makes plenty of sense the more voe from outside the desert you meet.” Naafora, the eldest, added, then gave Gan a gentle shove. “You’re alright, brother, but that’s because you only _look_ like a little voe.” He scowled at her for that. ‘Voe’ meant male, of course, which he technically was, but the connotations of the word in every Gerudo dialect were strictly reserved for non-Gerudo. He was Gerudo, so he couldn’t be voe, but his sisters still occasionally liked to tease when his mothers weren’t paying enough attention. “You’re the exception instead of the rule.”

Fikriya wandered off to meet her friend in the guard, the younger of his sisters found their way to the shops in the main square, and Gan, trying to center himself in this unfamiliar and shockingly busy place, decided to follow his ona around and pretend the decision was made out of duty and not out of nerves. He carried her basket for her, and helped her pick out more ripe fruit from the vendors, and observed the bustle around him, already concocting strategies for when he felt brave enough to tackle the city on his own.

For a few months, he enjoyed the trips to Gerudo town almost entirely because of the opportunities to listen to people talk. The dialect of Gerudo that they spoke here was odd to his ears, and some words had morphed into forms he couldn’t quite recognize, but most everyone spoke Hylian while conducting business regardless, so he didn’t need to worry terribly much about not understanding. Unless, of course, it was the subject matter itself that was confusing.

At first he assumed he was imagining it, but uncomfortably often he would hear something that sounded like his name being said in whispered conversation- more often than not among a group of children. Eventually, his curiosity go the better of him, and he wandered away from his ona’s shadow to listen a bit closer.

“-n’then the hero took his big huge sword an’ swung it and he blasted the magic ball right back into Ganondorf’s face!”

Gan almost dropped the basket he was carrying, almost lost all the most delicate voltfruit he and ona had picked out, but he steadied himself as a second child added in helpfully, “Bam! Juslikethat.”

“Annnnd,” the first kid said, clearly irritated by the interruption, “That’s how Link saved the kingdom and the princess and everyone everywhere from the evil menace!”

“You told it boring,” a third child said, and the first scowled. “My mama always sings the song parts in that one. You can’t just say he played a song and not sing the song! That’s _boring_.”

“Nuh-uh! You shouldn’t sing’em acause they’re _magic_ and you don’t wanna accidentally make it storm or something dumb,” the first said, and she sounded utterly confident.

“There’s a bad guy named Ganondorf?” Gan said, doing his best to make his voice sound mildly invested and not like he was leaping out of his skin. When two of the little vai’s scoffed, he shrank in on himself self consciously.

“Shyeah, of course-”

“What’re you stupid or something? Everybody knows about-”

“She’s from one of the northern traveling tribes,” a slightly older kid spoke up, tone much less aggressive. “Can’t you tell from how she talks? Maybe they don’t tell the same stories out there.”

“But I thought _everyone_ knew-”

“Clearly she doesn’t.” The older vai turned to Gan. “Right?”

“Right,” Gan confirmed, though he was a bit unhappy to have this much attention aimed at him. “What stories?”

One dark haired child nearly bounced herself off of her own feet in excitement. “Oh! Oh! Well, they’re all about this princess-”

“No! They’re about the hero!”

“It’s both,” the older vai interjected again, looking exasperated. “If you can’t keep from interrupting each other for a single sentence, I’ll tell it myself.” She rolled her eyes and turned her focus to Gan again. “It’s both of them. See, there’s always this princess, and there’s always a hero, and there’s always a villain.”

“Always?” Gan repeated, unsure.

“In the stories, I mean. There’s a bunch of stories- there’s this one I think is the first one, about this big bad thing that happened thousands and thousands of years ago, but there’s a bunch of other ones too. There’s a bad guy or a monster who wants to do bad things, and there’s a princess who is clever and who wants to stop him, and there’s a hero who protects her and defeats the villain.”

“It’s dumb because the princess never gets to fight,” the dark haired excitable one complained.

“Maybe so,” the older vai conceded. “But that’s not the point right now. So. You asked about Ganondorf?” she asked, and Gan nodded, though he was becoming less sure that he wanted to hear this. “Ganondorf is _the_ bad guy. Like, the biggest baddest. Sometimes he’s this big evil pig thing, and they usually call him Ganon then, but other times he’s a just a voe- but the cruelest, most evil voe ever. And some of the time, the thing he wants most in the whole world is this thing called the triforce- do you know about that?”

Gan- felt his heart thud, and his stomach lurch, but he had never heard that word before outside of his dreams, so he shook his head.

“It’s a really powerful magical thing.”

“Artifact,” another vai said, chipper, and the vai telling the story shot her a quelling look.

“Important magical artifact,” she amended, “and it’s got three sides, just like the story. There’s the part that’s for courage, and that’s the part for the hero, there’s the part that’s wisdom for the princess, and the part that’s power for the bad guy.”

Gan thought, _that doesn_ _’t sound quite right_ , and then, _why would power have to be evil, why is part of this artifact evil in the first place-_

“So Ganondorf is always after power, it’s all he cares about, and he’s gonna do whatever he can to get it and keep it and then get more and more, and usually that means finding a way to usurp the princess.” The vai seemed rather proud of using the word usurp- Gan thought it was a good enough word but he was too caught up in the rest of it to be impressed. “And then the hero has to defeat him.”

“Or they defeat him together, like the big one with Calamity Ganon,” the enthusiastic dark-haired vai added, and the vai telling the story conceded this with a nod.

“Yeah, sometimes.”

Gan was opening his mouth to ask another question when his mother swept by and collected him. The group of vais waved him off cheerfully enough, but Gan felt like his life had been - yet again - tipped off its axis, leaving him adrift.

“What were you speaking with the other vehvi about, Gan?” His mother asked, pulling the basket out of his hand to rearrange items between it and her own before she handed it back, marginally lighter than it had been.

“Just stories,” Gan said, but his voice sounded distant even to his own ears.

His mother’s steps faltered, and he was so surprised by it that his own followed suit, and when he looked up into her face he knew-

“Mother,” Gan said, and it wasn’t quite a question. If he had to place it, he would say that it was only just shy of an accusation.

She brushed her face over with a light sort of smile and lifted her basket higher on her hip. “We should find your sisters,” she said. “Your ona wanted to be home before dark, so we could make a proper meal of some of this while we still have the light.”

Gan frowned, though his feet followed after her own like a chick following behind her tail feathers. “Mother-”

“At home, Gan. Ah, there is Fikriya now.”

Gan, with no recourse against this distraction except to make a scene in the marketplace - which he was utterly unwilling to do - he frowned harder and half jogged to keep up with his mother. Fikriya was grinning in a way that was a little fevered, cheeks softly reddened, and as soon as their mother clasped her hand she burst into words.

“They want me to work for them!” she cried, visibly trying and failing to contain her glee. “Shimi said I should show her captain some of my work, and I did, and then she asked me to look at some of their armory, and I restrung one of their bows because it hadn’t been done properly and she said I had talent and she wanted me to come make and fix their bows for them!”

Their mother’s hand flew to her mouth, covering her smile to muffle her delighted noise.

Ganondorf was happy for his sister, but he could not keep his mind on it. He was thinking, instead, about names. Another of his sisters, Aadil, had been obsessed with names for a year or so when she was younger, when she had decided to start signing nicknames for her family instead of finger-spelling everything. She had gone around to the elders and storytellers from their clan and asked what each of their names meant. Gerudo had so many dialects spread across the desert, though, all of them with slight variations in meaning that had shifted like the sands over time, and she found that there were many answers for each name.

Naafora’s name meant something like oasis, which was what Aadil eventually took to calling her, but the exact connotations changed depending on who she asked. To their people, on the edge of the desert and the cliffs, it meant ‘flower in the cracks’, but farther out it meant the less poetic ‘respite’, and in the distant south it specifically meant ‘water among sands’. Aadil’s own name meant something like ‘sincere’ or ‘just’, varying slightly from clan to clan. Ganondorf’s name, though, had been an uncomfortable subject. He had been very young at the time, but he remembered the way Aadil’s eyes had narrowed, the strangely unsteady way her fingers had moved as she asked their parents why-

At home, in the shadow of the cliffs, Ganondorf’s name meant ‘strong willed.’ Innocuous, hopeful if vague. But every other dialect the entire desert over said his name with an edge of hatred.

_It means_ _‘incoming storm’ in the southeast,_ Aadil had signed, visibly angry. _It means_ _‘unyielding ruin’ in the shadow of the sisters, ‘devastation’ on the eastern dunes, and in the city it means-_

_Calamitous intent_ , their mother had signed. _I know._

_Then why, why would you-_

There had been explanations, of course, and Aadil and Gan and the rest of their siblings had accepted them easily enough. So few males born, so few male names to choose from. Gan meant will or power or strength, and it was simply a good, solid root of a name for a male child, and it had a fair enough meaning in their dialect, why should they concern themselves over what the city folk or the nomads thought?

Now, though-

What had that vai said, exactly? _Ganondorf is_ the _bad guy_ \- she had said it as if it were an unassailable truth, and if that was the name his mother and ona had chosen, what exactly did that mean? He was called Ganon, sometimes, in the dreams- the dreams themselves were already enough of a worry, and some of the things the vai had said had sounded so horribly, stomach-clenchingly familiar that he wanted to run and run- but from himself more than from anything else, and how would he do that, exactly?

He became aware that the three of them had been rejoined by a few more sisters, all clutched together in celebration of Fikriya’s good news, but the way Thamra kept glancing at him told him he was failing to hide his worry. He pretended not to have noticed, pretended to be too tired for conversation the entire trip back home, and when it was getting late after dinner he stubbornly stayed in their main tent after his sisters retired to their own. His mother and his ona had shared a brief, too-quiet-to-overheard conversation when they had arrived back home, but had not approached him or paid him any special mind while his sisters were still awake. Only when they were alone, and had been alone for some time, did his ona set aside her whetstone and blade with a sigh and turn to face him properly.

“Are you ready, then?” she asked.

“Ready?” Gan asked.

“To finally discuss what has been making you so frightened all this time.”

Gan stared blankly in a kind of horror. He knew they had been wary of his change in attitude, but he had no idea they had seen through him so thoroughly.

His mother placed a hand on ona’s shoulder from behind, a familiar gesture of comfort that Gan knew meant that his ona was burying her own emotions (fear? Anger? Worry? He could not be sure) behind pragmatism. “We have been patient, but it has been more than a year now.”

“It seems to be getting worse,” his mother said, and she was not bothering to mask her own worry. “We thought it best to let you come to us when you were ready.”

“I-” Gan realized with a burst of horror that he had no idea what he wanted to say. How could he explain? _In my dreams I am a monster and sometimes when I wake I forget for a moment that I am not_. _Am I evil? Did you know I was evil when you named me_?

He couldn’t say that, ask that. Not out loud.

“Aadil asked you about my name once and you said it was just a good name for a male and it had nothing to do with any rotten things other clans might think,” he said in one quick, racing stream of words. “But it’s not just the things my name means, is it? The stories they tell- the things they say in the city-”

“The stories are nonsense,” his mother said viciously. “I didn’t want you hearing any of that, I’m so sorry vehvi, you shouldn’t-”

“I dreamed about the things they say before I ever heard them,” he whispered, and it stopped his mother’s words cold.

His ona reached up and held his mother’s hand on her shoulder, turning the comfort back now that his mother was staring at him with wide, terrified eyes. Ona took a breath, and then asked, “What kinds of dreams, Ganondorf?”

He had been standing; now he sat hard on a cushion beside the table. “H-hard to remember,” he said, and that was mostly true. “Violent.”

“Violent?” his mother asked, voice trembling, and Gan hated this, hated himself, hated making his parents feel this way-

“We knew you were having bad dreams,” his ona said more evenly. “It is hard to keep that sort of thing hidden when we have no walls between us. We had thought, though, that it was a symptom. Do you believe it is the cause?”

“I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t think so,” he admitted. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing is wrong with you, vehvi,” his mother insisted, and he shook his head.

“If there was nothing wrong with me, I wouldn’t be dreaming like this every single night,” he said, voice dull. “Wouldn’t be dreaming about hurting people and-”

Dying. He couldn’t tell his mother that, though. Couldn’t make her cry- she was already close enough.

“You need not tell us more than you wish to,” his ona said quietly. “All we want to know is how we may help you through this.”

He sucked in a breath, rubbed a hand across his cheek without thinking about it. “I don’t… am I a bad child?”

“No, vehvi,” his mother said quickly, and Gan looked at his ona.

“You have always been a good child,” his ona said. “Withdrawn, lately, and scared. But good.”

“You would tell me if I started acting- evil?”

“If you did, yes,” ona said. “Though I do not believe that you would.”

“Why aren’t you more- why do you seem like- how long have you known something like this was coming?”

“We suspected,” ona said gently. “Would it have helped if we interrogated you, pushed you into talking before you were ready?”

Gan felt a flash of irritation and stuffed it down, forcing himself to actually consider the question. “Probably not. I would have- I would have lied, I think. I’m sorry.” He pressed his lips together and worked his jaw for a moment. “How can I fix it? Make the dreams stop?”

“I don’t know,” ona said.

His mother, working hard not to cry, said, “I wish we had better answers for you, love.”

“Did my sisters… is this only happening to me?”

“You are having a rather unique adolescence.” His ona’s mouth pulled into a vague, humorless smile. “Though I doubt you will find a way to be more troublesome in your growing years than Thamra was at that age.”

Gan gave his own weak smile, but did not laugh.

“None of this is going to be easy,” ona said, “but do not let that frighten you further.” She smiled, reached out and cupped his cheek in her warm, calloused hand. “We are here, and we will help. When you need support, or to be reminded who you are, or if you just need someone to speak with in the night to keep your burden of dreams at bay, we are here. Naafora already suspects on her own, and we can explain to her if you do not feel ready to do so yourself. If you would like.”

His mother smiled in a watery but reassuring way. “We won’t tell her if you would prefer not, but I know that she looks out for you, and she has been as worried as we have.”

Gan felt his throat go dry, but after a moment he nodded. Allies, he thought. Whatever this thing was, his mind or his soul or his demon, he could fight it better with allies.

He would never stop worrying about this, he thought suddenly, with clarity, but perhaps he could find ways to ease it. Saying some of it out loud was the first step. Someday, he thought he might be ready to share the rest.


	2. Chapter 2

Once it had been discussed out loud, and once Naafora knew about the dreams as well (he could tell when his parents told her, the way she looked at him, the defensive posture she took by his side when they were in the city, how she kept pulling him into games and conversations with their sisters), it was only a matter of time before the rest of the family knew as well. It wasn’t that his eldest sister was untrustworthy, it was simply the nature of family, as far as Gan was concerned. Secrets did not last long in his home. Aadil knew early, a dubious benefit of her lip reading skill was her tendency to accidentally ‘overhear’ conversations across their camp, and soon after Jasra knew, and eventually it seemed like everyone had at least some idea of what was happening with Gan.

At least, as much of an idea as Gan himself had, which wasn’t very much by his own estimation. He had expected - feared - that some of them would treat him differently, with pity or with fear, but besides Naafora’s slightly transparent attempts to engage him, they were all still the same equally loving and annoying sisters he had always had. He felt like a clamp had been removed from his jaw, like he was allowed to breathe, to talk about it, to think about it. He still didn’t _want_ to talk about it, but- now the option was there, and it was a lot harder to pretend that nothing was wrong.

“Sometimes I worry that one day I’ll wake up and everything good inside me will just be… gone,” Gan said while they sat on the ridge one day, many weeks after that conversation with his mothers, while they watched a sandstorm on the horizon slowly transforming the distant landscape. He’d been thinking about this for so long, and he could only say it aloud now because he wasn’t looking ona or his sister in the eyes. He could pretend, this way. Pretend he was by himself, giving his words to the sand and wind. “I worry I’ll wake up and carry the dreams out with me, carry out the malice and evil and it’ll just eat up everything. Eat up the rest of me.”

He heard the sand shift beside him and he knew without looking that his ona was making his sister be still. The silence after that was long enough that the ripples of their movement in the sand shivered their way all the way down to the bottom of the ridge. He imagined that this was deliberate on his ona’s part. He kept himself from fidgeting only through sheer force of will. His limbs were getting long before he was filling out in musculature, and his newly awkward and gangling limbs ached to stretch, ached to move. He was trying to cultivate in himself some measure of patience, but the urge to stand and pace, to stretch, to say something else and distract, to turn his head and see what his ona and sister’s faces were doing, it was all nearly overwhelming.

Eventually, his ona’s voice came low, just barely louder than the constant hiss of the sand. “I do not think that the shadow behind you is stronger than you are, Ganondorf.”

His mouth twisted, his brows pulled down. “It is. I- it- this thing, it’s stronger than I could ever dream of being.” He growled under his breath when he realized his phrasing and cut off the joke he imagined that his sister was going to make with, “You know what I mean. It’s- it’s _so much_ and it- there’s no room for me- for Gan, there is no space in the storm of it all. It doesn’t feel like it’s something alive trying to escape - not yet - but it feels like a memory, and if my past is capable of _that_ , of that kind of hate- what would that mean for me besides destruction?”

“Oh, Gan,” his sister tried again, and she sounded so serious, so empathetic that he wanted to bite his own tongue out for saying this to her- to both of them. Now that he’d started, though, he couldn’t make himself stop.

“I know the stories, now.” He said, voice gone dull. “I know you tried to keep me away from them but I know now and I know why my name means ‘calamitous intent’ in the dialect they speak in the city. I know what I am, ona.”

“You are Ganondorf, first son of the Gerudo in decades.”

He spun towards his ona, voice going high and scratchy and face contorted in fury to hide his overwhelming despair. “I am Ganon! I’m going to be Ganon, the calamity! The terror they warn children of, to keep them from straying! There are hundreds of stories and in every one my name sits on the shoulders of the cruelest being, the most evil creature- some _demon_ who keeps this land from ever, ever being truly safe or happy. I’m going to be that! Going to be a destructor, a murderer, a warlord and kidnapper and fiend! That _thing_ is me!”

His words whipped away in the wind and he was glad of that, at least, because now his ona’s eyes on him were burning with- something. Not anger. Maybe closer to pain. Still, she didn’t speak, but he saw his sister squeeze his ona’s hand and then she narrowed her eyes at him.

“Have you murdered someone and not told us, Gan?” his sister asked, tipping her head to the side critically.

He jolted, quickly saying, “Of course not.”

“Kidnapped anyone?”

“No, Naafora, you know-”

“Commanded any horrific armies? Burned temples? Razed cities? Destroyed the world?”

“Naafora. I-”

“You are a child, brother.” She reached out and he flinched, but she didn’t stop, pulling him stubbornly into a sideways sort of hug. “You are not a monster. Some anger? Pah, that is as normal as anything. You are not cruel, brother, and you never will be. I don’t care what some old stories say about someone with your name. I don’t care what your own mind is telling you. I know you, vehvi voe. You are not a monster.”

“But I _could_ be,” he said, low, muffled by Naafora’s shoulder, and she squeezed him tighter. She opened her mouth to answer, but their ona stepped closer finally, and reached up her hand to lift Gan’s chin, gently making him meet her eye.

“Any of us could be a monster, little one. Any person. It is in the choosing. We must _choose_ to keep ourselves from cruelty. We must choose to be better than we could have been. You are…” she paused, gently brushing her thumb across his cheek, “uniquely challenged in this. But you are not alone. You are not alone in this, and we will always help you remember yourself.”

He swallowed and his eyes felt too hot. “Ona-”

“Just because someone has done evil in the past, does not mean that they must do evil in the future. The capacity for evil does not demand it. You can choose. You can choose anything.”

It was like the stillness of night after a sandstorm passed, the crystal clarity of stars. He hadn’t even considered, before, that he could have a choice, that he would not be bound to his past.

He closed his eyes and let his ona and his sister hold him, breathing easier than he had in ages.

“We should return,” Naafora said, casual, after a generous minute or so. “The storm is changing direction, and we should secure the shelter while we can.”

His ona let his shoulders go, stretching on her toes and grinning in the general direction of the incoming weather. “I knew this one wouldn’t pass. Your mother and I had a wager…”

“What this time, ona?” Naafora asked. “How many weeks of cooking will she owe you?”

“Not cooking this time. I may keep her new yellow scarf until the next storm,” their ona said, preening.

“I don’t know why she ever take those wagers from you, ona! You always, always win them anyway, and she still takes them, and then-”

Gan followed his ona and his sister back towards the rest of his family, listening to their comfortingly casual chat, feeling light, feeling free, feeling, finally, like the world was open before him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Naafora's use of 'vehvi voe' here is meant in a teasing way, not to indicate that Gan considers himself a voe. That felt important to clarify.


	3. Chapter 3

“I don’t know what you plan to do, now you are an adult by our measure,” his ona said, voice calm and low and unhurried. “But I hope that you aren’t planning to limit yourself because of this whole… destiny nonsense.”

Gan’s hand slipped as he cut the fat and sinew off of the meat in front of him, and he just barely avoided slicing his pointer finger open. His ona raised an eyebrow, and he set the knife down with more care than strictly necessary, in case the conversation took them to any more surprising places. “What… what do you mean, ona?”

“You can do whatever you want with your life, Ganondorf. You know you don’t need to stay here.”

“I…” his face fell, then went perfectly blank. “You want me to leave?”

“No, child,” she said, much softer. “No. Of course not. I’ve been struggling for years to keep your more wanderlust-stricken sisters at home with us for as long as I can, of _course_ I don’t want you to leave as well.” She heaved a breath, pausing her own work to rub an eye. “But _you_ want to leave.”

“I don’t-”

“I know you, Ganondorf. I know the way you look at the traders at market, I know the way you stare to the east, towards the greenlands, and the way you watch the skies in the north for the bird folk. You have always had such curiosity, but now you make yourself stay, and your mother and I worry for you more than we would worry if you left.”

“I’m not-” he started, and then, “I don’t know-” and when his ona pursed her lips critically, he grit his teeth and sighed. “I’m perfectly content here.”

“ _Are_ you,” she said, somewhere between rhetorical and disbelieving.

“I am!”

“Hm.” She half turned away and went back to stirring the rice, and though Gan knew that she was trying to get a reaction from him, he still couldn’t help it.

“I am _fine_ , ona. I don’t need you and mother worrying about this too, you have enough-”

“We will always worry for our children first of all,” she interrupted mildly.

“I don’t need worrying for!”

“Psh.”

“Ona,” he bit out, dragging the word into more than its usual two syllables. “Why do you think I don’t want to be here, with my family?”

“Oh child,” she says, sympathetically, pausing to pat him on the shoulder. “I know that you love us, and I know that you would stay here forever if we asked you to. But we won’t ask. Not for that.”

“But I’m- ona I’m not- I’m not _leaving_ , ona!”

“Mm, not yet,” she said, smile going tight and a little crooked. “No, not yet.”

“You aren’t listening to me, ona.”

“Gan, you riddled that poor caravan with questions for the entire evening they stayed with us, and I know it wasn’t some little infatuation with that young vai because you were interrogating every one of them as they allowed you.”

“They were from so far away, I was just curious-”

“You hold up a shield as if I’m accusing you of something,” she said, tilting her head. “I am not. You have been taking the lessons in meditation and inward thought to heart, have you not? Try to think on this, next time you sit with yourself.” She glanced toward him ruefully. “I thought you knew your heart, but perhaps I pushed too fast.”

Gan took that gratefully as the ending of that line of questioning, and turned back to his work, finally retrieving the knife and cleaning the meat.

The silence afterward was- not unpleasant, not really, but Gan’s brain wouldn’t stay quiet to match. Ona had prodded at him, dislodged him from where he had comfortably nested himself in, and now he was having trouble remembering how, exactly, he had made himself fit before.

The feeling lasted through dinner, and he barely noticed his sisters (all but Fikriya, who had gone to Gerudo town to spend time with her friend Shimi and to sell her skills building and repairing bows) conversing around him and passing food around. He ate what was on his plate, but he barely tasted his own hard work because he was so distracted.

He couldn’t work out what about his ona’s words had bothered him so deeply. She was _wrong_ , so why should he be concerned? Perhaps, long ago in his childhood, he had harbored dreams of travel and adventure, but what child didn’t? Now he was grown, and the desert and the highlands were vast enough, full enough. He hadn’t learned all that his homeland had to teach him, not yet. He could stay, he could be perfectly content.

Wrapped in his thick blanket against the frigid desert night a few hours later, he turned that word over in his mind. Content. He was, wasn’t he? He was a good fighter now, he was near equal to most of his sisters and he could beat Jasra one-on-one every time. He knew the desert landscape inside and out, could probably pick out every edible growing thing from the highest of the highlands to the driest dunes, could navigate by sun or by starlight with equal ease, and why would he not be content with that?

 _Shouldn_ _’t I be… more than that, though?_ He thought, and his mind suddenly stilled.

Content. He was content. What had he said to his ona? He was fine. He was content. Not glowing, loving assertions, were they? He was content- was he happy?

He stared at a spot where the tent was loose, flapping lightly in the breeze and giving him fleeting glimpses of familiar constellations, two or three at a time, hard to recognize without their proper context, and he thought again, with a bit more desperation, _am I happy_?

By morning, having not slept particularly well and not feeling happy about _that_ at the very least, he took a deep breath and stared at the horizon and let himself feel what he really wanted.

He wanted to _go_. To see new things. To find out what kind of person he would be on his own, to prove that he could do good in the world-

So what, then? Was he was going to be some sort of traveling do-gooder? That sounded… a bit idealistic, at best.

He kicked his bare toes in the sand and scowled. Do-gooder, probably not. A traveler, though- he had skills, didn’t he? He was the best in his family at caring for their weapons (everyone always came to him to sharpen their blades, and Fikriya trusted only him to help string and re-string her bows), he was a skilled rider of camels and he could hold his own with the sand seals, and he had a head for strategy that made him nervous when he really thought about it. He couldn’t remember a time he had ever lost when he played Tâb or chess with either his sisters or his parents. He could be useful elsewhere too, couldn’t he?

His ona knew before he told her- knew the moment they next made eye contact. He could tell by the way her face softened into an expression of resignation, the way she reached out and held his mother’s hand, gentle, anchoring.

He tried to smile, tried to project some measure of comfort. “Not yet, ona,” he said as he passed them into the big tent to start helping with breakfast. “You were right. But not just yet.”

**Author's Note:**

> Gerudo terms:  
> Voe - man  
> Vai - woman  
> Vehvi - baby, child
> 
> Other:  
> Ona - Uzbek word for mother that I lifted for Gan's other parent. Ona is actually not a Gerudo; her family is from across the desert to the far west, but she's been here most of her life.
> 
> Title taken from a line of the song Make Them Gold by the band CHVRCHES.


End file.
